Doesn’t it kind of defeat the purpose of lying about having the flu to get out of something, if you give quotes to an article with your full name and all the details of the event/work you were avoiding…???

@craygirl Yeah, I thought that when I read: “The flu is a good cover right now,” said Paul Johnson Calderon, a bow-tie designer and regular at New York social events. He said he used the excuse to shirk a friend’s recent fashion show.” — well, you’re busted now, Calderon.

@craygirl came here to say that same thing. “What are the odds that my friend will read this obscure little magazine or whatever, this so called Wall Street Journal? Anyway, my friend’s a bore and lies are fun, next question, please!”

Logan’s tag that “the tricky part comes when you actually do get the flu next week oops” sums up perfectly why I am too poor to do this. I can’t afford to be told to go home one week when I am actually sick, if I used up all my sick days already because I pretended the week before!

Where I work you just have a pool of paid time off, not sick days vs. vacation days, which I guess skips the need for pretending to be sick, etc., but also means that super sick people will come in as long as they’re well enough to walk. I’ve done it.

@Michelle Haha. This is a recurring thing I say! Sick days aren’t real – that is, there is no sick day fairy giving you a day off with no consequences. There are two two possibilities:

1) Most common, you get paid for sick days you don’t at the end of the year. So that means every sick day you use, you lose money. Which means you are actually, like a part time worker, paying to not come in to the office.
2) You DON’T get paid for unused sick days, in which case your company is just not giving you that money, and you’re NOT getting paid XX number of days (where X is the number of sick days you get.)

One way or another, that cost is being passed on to you, the employee. Which is why I advocate for the complete removal of sick days and vacation days, replacing it with federal protection from being fired for not coming to work when you’re sick/on vacation (up to a certain number of days.) But then we don’t pretend that sick days are just free money.

@deepomega I’m sorry, what? I absolutely get paid if I call in sick or go on vacation. Even when I worked retail, I had paid time off. How am I losing money if I take a sick day? If I didn’t have that sick day, and needed to call out sick, then I would lose money. But this makes no sense to someone who works in an office with paid time off. And some companies do pay out for unused time off…

If you get paid for unused time off, then every sick day you take, you lose money. (Since you’ll get paid less at the end of the year.) So in that situation, “paid” sick days are just deferring your not-getting-paid till the end of the year.

If you DON’T get paid for unused days, then the money shifting happens behind the scene. Since your office is paying you for XXX days of work, where XXX = days in a year minus number of sick days they offer you. They will pay you this no matter what. So if you work more than that, by taking fewer sick days, you’re doing more work for less money.

@deepomega @deepomega Well, okay, except that this is all perspective. I mean, sure, you could argue that the business has calculated my exact worth to the DAY when negotiating my salary, and is paying me that, with 5 days already subtracted out. However since, for the most part, people do not take all of their days, I don’t think that is the mindset.

To put it another way, I’m pretty sure at my workplace we are being paid for XXX days of work, where XXX = every operating day we are expected to be there. The expectation and norm is that not all sick days are taken. And my employer definitely could say – take a sick day whenever you want, but that day will be subtracted from your salary. This is what happens over a certain # of days. I’m thankful there is a grace period before that limit.

(and honestly, in my work, taking a sick day amounts to MORE WORK than being there, but is also expensive for the employer as he needs to bring someone else in for the day and pay them. Can you guess what I do?)